Comparing apples with oranges
"DVD and Blu-ray drives can still play 31 year-old CDs like Billy Joel's '52nd Street'" is a misleading statement. I'd be surprised if anybody with experience in the optical recording industry could make it by mistake.
The Billy Joel CD will have had the bits physically pressed into the plastic substrate, coated with aluminium to make it reflective and then sealed under another layer of plastic. IOW, assuming you have a working drive, the only things that can stop the disk being read are physical damage or the chemical destruction of the aluminium reflective layer[1]. However, a disk burnt by a read/write drive has not been pressed: instead, a layer of dye has had its state altered by the write laser. This isn't nearly as permanent because it doesn't take much to affect the dye enough to make the recording unreadable. Storing it in a hot place or with bright light on the recording surface can both do that. I've had audio CDs recorded on computers become unreadable after about 5 years[2].
[1] Sony demonstrated this when it sold CDs in cardboard sleeves which had a high sulphur content: the sulphur diffused in from the edges of the disk and reacted with the aluminium mirror, converting it into non-reflective aluminium sulphide. These CDs became unreadable in under 18 months: Sony had to replace them.
[2] the disks were burnt by the original artist in case you're wondering